Why do we need the social part of the site at all?

There is an excellent answer to the forums being toxic, to clubs being dead, to the blogging platform being overrun by garbage, to game chat being a source of constant problems, to the dead chat sections of the tournament pages, to the constant bickering over whether or not we should thank the other person for a good game, or whether we should accept rematches, and to the pointless accumulation of friends. It would also be a solution to the servers going down on a too-frequent basis, and still allow you enough scratch to give away big chunks of the user fees. Just dump that whole part of the site and chalk it up to a very understandable desire to keep up with social media.

The only question, really, is would it help or hurt the bottom line. I think that a lot of people would want to eliminate the social aspect altogether, and since your main competitor is also trying to keep up with social media, there's a major difference that could be created between the two right away. It's not like their own social media section is thriving either.

To be the site where you don't have to interact with anyone, I think that's a great idea. *Somebody* should do it.

I don't like to, for the most part, though I do show up here every day. But man they could jettison this section easily and save a bundle in terms of resources. *All* the social stuff. And they wouldn't need to fire people, because that section relies on volunteers. It would also improve their image tenfold. Underneath the more kiddie aspects of chesscom are some really wonderful and useful features. Think about what Chessify is trying to do with renting out their cloud analysis (which is what I think they're doing, at any rate), and how close chesscom already is to being able to provide something like that. Doesn't chesscom use 8-man tablebases? That's something nobody has access to, because it wouldn't fit on any of our computers. They do all sorts of interesting things.

The site was created as a social chess site. Having an active chess community is fundamental to site's identity. There are plenty of members that just come for some aspect of the social type features and more that come for the combination.

I don't see those options ever being removed.

Regarding the tablebase comments, the site uses the 7-piece (and below) Syzygy tablebases.

https://support.chess.com/article/3399-how-can-i-view-the-tablebase-on-chess-com

have no idea where you get your facts from ----- but most chess players that i talk to  here really want to have and enjoy  the chat part and social part of this site -- for me its the best part others not so much do they do like  reading about others play and how others explain their tactics - i think most do also - reading even about topics like this -- makes me think -- and stay on the site --and that i think is the point to stay engaged on this site even when not playing a game 

You don't have to interact with anyone on this site, though.  No one forces you to do blogs and you can easily disable chat.

As someone who is helping on a club, I am pretty sure 75% of the members are dark.  Don't do forums, don't do chat, don't do anything except play chess.   They are completely unknown.   And I am cool with that. 

If you go to:

Settings --> Privacy --> Safe Mode

Enable it, and all social aspects of the website will be disabled for you (forums will be blocked, chat will be disabled, messages will be prevented).

I enable it, sometimes, when I want to focus on chess, and want to avoid the temptation to argue on the forums.

Interesting. Does it do anything to clubs or unfollow you from all forums? If it only temporarily blocks everything (destroying nothing!) then I might try it every now and then...

I just checked that now:

It's temporary - blocks the forums, chat, messages. It doesn't erase your followed threads or clubs or anything - they all come back once you turn Safe Mode off again.

Okay, just to be clear: the reason we don't need the social aspect is not because I personally don't like it. That goes without saying. It's because it sucks up a massive amount of time, energy and funds. Those could be used elsewhere, since they're finite.

I was wondering about the tablebases comment. I guess 7-piece is difficult to install as well, but that's not so rare. And maybe 8-piece is something I was only reading about.

If it never changes, that's fine. More than anything, this is just to say, there is probably a market for the chess equivalent of the Diogenes Club.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a multi-million dollar corporation knows the best use of their money.  Like, they literally hire people to analyze their returns on spending.

Man, I can see where both of you are coming from. Of course they know what they're doing, but then again I like big ideas, so I tend to talk about stuff like that. It's more of a bad habit on my part than anything. :-)

But yeah, social media is a bit of a failed experiment. It makes sense when it's the primary function of a site, e.g. FB or Reddit, but it makes less sense when you add it on to something else. And that's borne out by how dead much of the social parts of the site are. It's like they're propping all this stuff up that they could do without. But again, I just like to bite off more than I can chew in terms of ideas. It should be pretty obvious I don't know business. :-)

Only a fraction of the advertised number of members play chess here. Why else do they join?

When the site started it was mainly social features. Daily Chess was added a little after and live later still.  If you go and read some of the site history posts by @erik, you'll see that the social part was integral to the site.

Is the OP a leftist by any chance?

Username does not check out.

Censorship, stopping the flow of ideas... "we are doing it for your own protection", etc...

I think you need Aisle 10.

Oh shoot. I just realized you're actually serious. No, getting rid of social media is not censorship. It just means we can do without this. What do you think? I can.

We need the social aspect of this site because Facebook sells your data and Twitter is owned by a perv.